Success: Django hello world on azure!

Something made me think of verifying all the django packages in my github repository, as well as my local repository, and I realised that the whole sql folder was missing. I tried to add the files in it manually and got ' did not match any files' - so obviously there was something wrong with my .gitignore file…I looked through it for everything python related, and then noticed a 'sql' entry. Doh, it was ignoring the whole folder. Removed that line, commit, deploy, and voila!

Now to figure out manage.py…

So, found a tutorial.

Step 1: run manage.py runserver

Result: error "ImportError: No module named 'django'

Googling implies a path error : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5428704/manage-py-runserver-importerror-no-module-named-mysite

Fixed!

And now, found an introduction to django - a whole book, apparently. Which seems good as I have no idea how to get my existing app running through django. http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter02.html

Was good that they included the test 'import django' instructions, as it turned out I didn't have any of it in my PYTHONPATH - it was all just in my path.

I'll ignore the database section for now, because I don't actually plan to use a database for this at all.  I've already done the create project steps while setting up the site with azure. So I'm straight through to chapter 3: setting up webpages!

Creating views.py looks a little familiar from when I did the first half of that google app engine course - I guess I really should have finished it :)

Pleasantly surprised by the 'django automatically detects code changes' note, I was expecting to have to restart the server :)

Doh, and an import error. Foolishly copying and pasting, of course I don't have a module called mysite.views, I gave it a much more descriptive name! And - got the hello world page going.

Ooh, I bet this will come in handy at some point: 

At any point in your view, temporarily insert an assert False to trigger the error page.

From <http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter03.html>

So, half past twelve and end of a chapter - time to commit, confirm it all works on azure as well as my box, and go practice hindi.  And it all works exactly the same! A successful evening.